Silverlight-powered Bing Maps beta is beautiful, slow

Microsoft is offering a new version of Bing Maps, powered by Silverlight, that …

Microsoft today launched a new Silverlight-powered Bing Maps experience into beta. You can still use the normal non-Silverlight HTML version over at Bing.com/Maps but you now also have access to the Silverlight beta version at Bing.com/Maps/Explore. Comparing the two side-by-side, we have to say the HTML version is noticeably faster, but the Silverlight version offers a myriad of new features that push mapping forward. Microsoft calls it "spatial search" as it offers a mapping experience that easily lets you take what you're already doing offline and transition it online.

The Silverlight version meshes together Road and Aerial modes: you start by seeing roads and their names, zoom in a bit further to see the aerial photography for the area, and then zoom in yet again to see the streetside view of the area. Of course, the imagery for these features aren't supported everywhere, but where they are, they work quite well and you can zoom, pan, and move around with ease. Everything transitions very smoothly, and Microsoft clearly made a point to make everything pretty. Unfortunately, the performance is definitely lacking.

Apps

Possibly the most interesting part is that Microsoft has launched a new Application Gallery which lets developers include their own information on a map. Here's the list of maps apps Microsoft is shipping today: What's nearby, Local Lens, Twitter Maps, Photosynth, Current traffic, Trafficland, Businesses by category, Today's front pages, Restaurant finder, Hotel finder, Travel webcams, Roadside attractions, Roadside sculptures, Urban graffiti, Urban murals, and Signs & billboards.

Each application lets you see specific data based on what location you're looking at (such as tweets for Twitter, local blog posts for Local Lens, or local stores and shops for What's nearby. Photosynth, a technology that can piece together multiple images of an area or object from multiple angles, has probably the one with the most potential out of all the apps: it lets you upload images for a given place and then places them on the map in the form of a synth, creating a virtual walkthrough. If this catches on with Bing users, Microsoft will soon have tons of amazing virtual walkthroughs all around the world for museums and other tourist destinations.

The Bing team says it is working hard to make this platform available to more developers in the future, since the community around apps for location-based services is exploding, but wouldn't give a specific date. The goal is to enable a simpler way for these apps to be developed, shared, and layered without a person having to have their own dedicated hosting platform.

So far, the new Silverlight version is great step forward, but the service is clearly still in beta and still very limited to the data Microsoft has on each location. It's definitely worth trying out though, if you're an owner of the 45 percent of Internet-connected devices worldwide that use Silverlight (as of November 2009). If you're not, start with the 3 minute and 21 second video with Blaise Ag�era y Arcas, Chief Architect of Bing Maps, and then decide if you want to get Silverlight to try the service out.

This isn't the first time Microsoft has put out a Silverlight-only feature on Bing Maps: in September 2009, Bing got a new Visual Search feature, also in beta. A few days later, Microsoft confirmed that it was hoping it could use Bing to increase Silverlight market share.

Must be the time of day or something when you did your review. It's the snappiest maps app yet. I still prefer google maps because they don't hide most of their data like MS does. But that's only useful for scraping

This is really nice. Extremely nice. I want to use this map engine to host my internal infrastructure data. The only problem I have is tall buildings in a sea of smaller structures (the buildings look slanted when they're not).

Wow, I think this is really great. Zooming was (mostly) smooth, info was right in our area.

What surprised me is that it performed well even though we have only wireless broadband in our area and it's barely broadband at half a meg transfer rate (at the best of times). But, still quite usable.

The Silverlight version meshes together Road and Aerial modes: you start by seeing roads and their names, zoom in a bit further to see the aerial photography for the area, and then zoom in yet again to see the streetside view of the area.

Which is great because now you can zoom to bird's-eye view and pan around much more easily. Then you can zoom in to street view or zoom out to aerial. The old bird's-eye view always got me lost!

Bing maps has one major feature Google maps needs. Birds Eye. This alone makes bing maps worth using to me

No one is current on everything on the maps and it's annoying.

I checked a university with 15,000 students in a town of 425,000 that changed names 4 years ago. Bing Maps still has the wrong name.

Yahoo maps has the right name.

With Google Maps they have a maps review process now. I can't say that it was only me, but I was able to put in a change of point of interest and the name is finally current along with other POIs which were placed wrong I reported.

At the same university they began construction on an arena 2 years ago and have since finished it. Only bing maps has the construction site on the aerial maps.

I installed Silverlight for some "special features" on our apartment's website. It turned out to just be a slideshow.

The new Bing Maps is definitely pretty, and I've always loved the Bird's Eye. Unfortunately they're losing ground to Google on the useful info that's available. At least here in Seattle, Google Maps now has traffic info for all arterial streets (not just highways as on bing), transit info, and bike trails.

Ha ha, welcome to a world where the only "browser supported" is the one that's "runs" on Windows.

I'm curious why he need moon-night though.

Haven't tried on Mac myself cause I don't like to be pushed at installing yet another Adobe "flash" from a company that you can trust (wont trust my dirty pants to MS), no thanks.

So you're complaining that it's not supported on anything but Windows... because you refuse to install the plugin that Microsoft make available for OS X. Protip: that means it's supported. If you don't want to install the plugin, that's your choice, but by refusing to do so you don't exactly have much ground to stand on when complaining about it not working...

Moonlight is the open source Linux implementation of Silverlight by the Mono folks.

Bing, unlike Google, seems to always get my current location perfectly. That alone is pretty freaking awesome. Also, I think Bing's maps are much less ugly than Google's - ever since they made a change about two years ago, satellite maps have always been fuzzy rather than sharp. The zoom algorithm prefers to stretch rather than shrink, even when the higher resolution panels are in cache, so the view never quite pops anymore.

I was so let down when they did the same thing to Google Earth, and added a blur vignetting alongside it. Now it always looks upscaled.

It's still not enough to make me switch away from Google as my default.

The Silverlight version meshes together Road and Aerial modes: you start by seeing roads and their names, zoom in a bit further to see the aerial photography for the area, and then zoom in yet again to see the streetside view of the area.

Which is great because now you can zoom to bird's-eye view and pan around much more easily. Then you can zoom in to street view or zoom out to aerial. The old bird's-eye view always got me lost!

That's cool and all but what is REALLY COOL is that you can spin the birds eye view around to the left/right and get completely different views of the same thing. I'm house shopping right now and this is a fantastic way of seeing neighborhoods and all four faces of houses and yards you can't see in listings.

I'm still more of a fan of Google maps but this is will definitely get some use.

BTW, I'm on a 2+ year old MBP running 10.6.2. Performance seems good for me.

UPDATE: After opening a second instance of the new Bing maps it stopped responding to pans. Then when closing both windows Silverlight crashed (but didn't take the browser with it, I'm guessing due to Snow Leopard's boxing of plugins).

Bing Maps with Silverlight is awesome. I wish they'd integrate tagged photos and PhotoSynth (Microsoft... can you hear me... buy flickr...) to compete against G****e Street View, really useful for phototourism as well as actually confirming that a business really exists. Though it's less useful when the photos are outdated too.

Aside from the DIY job done by you-know-who, I would guess most of the mapping data is from Navteq or TeleAtlas who will "occasionally" map the place when they want to. Both Bing, Yahoo! Local and G*****e give me inaccurate results when searching for a certain $5 pizza buffet chain near my area, including a wild chocobo chase to a phantom "restaurant" location that actually seems to be just a muni shelter with various food crumbs.

I also don't know what Emil is talking about. I tried it with Silverlight 3 and it is as fast as the Ajax version. But then i tried it with Silverlight 4 and it is the FASTEST map app i have ever seen. SL4 makes a huge difference, really amazing.

I am also glad that i was right on how they would go with a photosynth integration. There was already a SL3 visual earth version that integrated photosynth and it was really great so it makes all the sense in the world to have it integrated for everyone. Would not be surprised if that decision was taken when they saw that mashup.

Originally posted by Seiryu:Bing Maps with Silverlight is awesome. I wish they'd integrate tagged photos and PhotoSynth (Microsoft... can you hear me... buy flickr...) to compete against Street View, really useful for phototourism as well as actually confirming that a business really exists.

Ha ha, welcome to a world where the only "browser supported" is the one that's "runs" on Windows.

I'm curious why he need moon-night though.

Haven't tried on Mac myself cause I don't like to be pushed at installing yet another Adobe "flash" from a company that you can trust (wont trust my dirty pants to MS), no thanks.

So you're complaining that it's not supported on anything but Windows... because you refuse to install the plugin that Microsoft make available for OS X. Protip: that means it's supported. If you don't want to install the plugin, that's your choice, but by refusing to do so you don't exactly have much ground to stand on when complaining about it not working...

Moonlight is the open source Linux implementation of Silverlight by the Mono folks.

he also trust adobe over MS - so we shouldnt expect him to have a sound mind to begin with...